In the initial stages of every startup, penetration rate holds more significance than fascinating design or full functionality. However, several questions might come to your mind. For instance, will your product be enough unique to get customer attention? Or How do you ensure that your product can solve the market problem without putting your finances at stake? Hence, the concept of a minimum viable product comes into mind. It has assisted billions of startups to make their ideas into reality.
Minimum Viable Product (MVP) – Detailed Overview
The Minimum Viable Product (MVP) is the initial (beta) version of the product that you provide to your target audience. However, the product still needs to undergo successive iterations over time to make it a high-standard product. This is the core idea of MVPs.
Eric Ries was the first who came up with the idea of a minimum viable product as a part of his startup methodology. The significant purpose of developing MVP is, that it’s the version of the new product that permits the developing team to gather the maximum amount of verified information about the client with the least amount of effort.
Most people link MVPs with startups since they gained popularity in 2008 across the globe. While it’s true for some reasons, some of the biggest companies that have become multinationals today, started as MVP startups. The vital reason for developing MVPs is to determine the correct market, target audiences, and product assumptions. Whereas, some of the assumptions will definitely be wrong, no matter what level of experience or expertise you have. Thus, MVP helps you to reduce the risks that you can experience in the software or product development phase.
Following are some reasons why companies need to go for MVPs
1. Launch the initial phase of the product to market for customer feedback.
2. Testing the initial version of the product with the target audience before investing a large budget to fully develop the idea.
3. Determine the features that are accepted by their target audience and what doesn’t
In addition to these perks of developing MVPs, it also allows companies to validate their product ideas without developing fully mature products in order to save time and cost resources businesses might use to build products that won’t survive in this fast-moving economy.
Top 6 Effective Ways of Building a Minimum Viable Product (MVP)
Bringing your idea into a real product requires certain crucial steps while developing MVP you require to undergo some stages of product development which are listed below;
Define Your Audience
In the first stage, companies need to identify the target audience along with the problems that your product will solve for them. For instance, you are developing an e-shopping crypto application. Buying cryptocurrencies is becoming the new trend, so what makes your application special or different from others is that it can make the buying or selling of digital currencies easy and secure. That’s what you need to shortlist your goals and objectives. Furthermore, to get accurate key findings, companies are also required to develop user personas. It’s the fictional representation of target clients that helps you to analyze the flow, for example, the steps they require to take in order to achieve the goal.
Identify the Budget and Timeline for the launch
The global market is full of competitors and they are always in search of suitable time in order to get the target audience’s attention. Therefore, it’s viable to develop and launch MVP at the right time in order to compete with the rivals as well as to meet the ever-evolving user demands. However, if companies fail to release the product at the right time, the features included can not be able to make their value in the future. In addition to this, keeping the product within the budget is also important.
Shortlist the Exact Features
Now, companies need to shortlist the functional and non-functional requirements that must need to be in the final iteration of the product. However, MVP can accommodate only some of them, so companies need to get answers to a few questions;
1. What will be the key feature of the product?
2. What unique features are to be added to get a competitive advantage?
3. What kind of innovative features will attract customers’ attention?
Furthermore, the features need to be prioritized and put under different categories. This will help companies to create a matrix that can accurately map the optional, main and additional features into various product release or development stages. Once the features are marked with their priority level, determine the features that are needed to be released in the first iteration, which in fact will be the minimum viable product (MVP). under each stage, the companies can see the total number of features that are dedicated to each release.
Choose Tools and Technologies
Selecting the suitable tools and technologies for MVP development also holds great significance. It is the art to transform ideas into a fully functional product. Thus, if you are planning to take the MVP to the next level of success, you need to determine the set of advanced tools and best-emerging technologies that can assist you to achieve your goals.
Develop your MVP
In case, if your startup is in a very early stage and is finding it hard to sustain with the limited resources, you might not afford the custom-developed MVP. then you simply need to do with the existing tools. However, the only way of developing the desired MVP that can help you to achieve your goals and objectives in a well-mannered way is to do it from scratch. If you can find an experienced software developer, you can save your time and resources on non-essential product releases.
Test and Iterate
As MVPs are particularly developed with limited resources, thus the testing of the product/s functionality is often not taken seriously. However, to make it a success, user acceptance testing is a must. This will mould your product into a viable position that will surely attract the target customers. Afterwards, launch your product and let the real customers do beta testing for you. This will be quite beneficial for you as the real people will be using your product and will be providing you with legit feedback.
Listen to the user feedback and take the suggestions and reviews seriously in order to make changes to the product. However, you need to have in mind that only the major bugs in the application need to be get fixed in the minimum viable product stage.
